A great leap towards reconciliation is made under the pontificate of Pope Francis: among Emperors, Popes, Roman nobles, and great saints, stands a small but central Piazza Martin Lutero: the German theologian of the Reformation is present now among them. He has the “right to exist” on the map. The Catholic Church is, finally, saying: “I hear what you say”, and gives him the right place to be present in her centre.

The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the wilful obliteration of their very subject matter, and it is a hopeless enterprise to...

“Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam” “Ubi Caesar, ibi Roma” (Old Roman proverbs) All roads lead to Rome, to the centre, to the political centre. This Roman principle is well known and today...

Our short post is to spotlight a small, maybe banal, yet very interesting, representation of the Crimea is US-and-Russia dialectics, usually a subject of imagination, even speculation, in political drama TV series. The Crimea, in one of the programme’s episodes, is presented as part of Russia, and not Ukraine.

The European Age of Discoveries has given us astonishing maps. Power relations of our present world were shaped out during that age. Today we have a short passage on the interesting power relations as shown in the Gemma Frisius’ and Peter Apian’s Charta Cosmographica from 1544. This map is a developed version of a famous precursor, Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographica, but with some different interesting features that can attest some shift in the centre of the map: we will show how the centre of the map shifted from knowledge (Waldseemüller’s) to power (Frisius’) and how cartography, being knowledge, served to build power and just power.

Quand Paris s’enrhume, l’Europe prend froid (“When Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold“, Prince Klemens von Metternich) Paris is hit for a second time in 2015, and this time the victims are way more...

Once there is a need to build a political centre the “builders” go to space-time to find legitimacy: in the case of Beirut many factors participated in this construction, and one of them is certainly the Justinian one. The Justinian Law was at the base of European civilisation and was quite a pertinent argument in the quest for legitimacy of a new sovereign political centre. We can here ask some further research questions: